I’ve always found it peculiar how people tend to praise statues and paintings of “healthy” — even plump — female subjects for their beauty, and yet beyond the museums, these same people  deem women whose body forms are similar to those artforms unattractive, fat, or a slew of other adjectives. How is it, I wondered, that we concoct this disjuncture between what we consider beautiful art and what we consider beautiful in the world around us (not that this isn’t art in some ways)?

Apparently, the residents of a small town in Tennessee are attempting to do away with this disjuncture. But now I’m left wondering whether it is best to acknowlege that we should be able to distinguish our opinions on bodies in art from our opinions on bodies in “the real world.”

In response to complaints about the classical-style, nude female statues at G & L Garden Center, the center covered the statues with two-piece sarongs. Apparently, doing so doesn’t just conceal the art. It also adds another layer to the art as the clothes alter the representation that people see and think about. Now many customers try to peek underneath the sarongs — which almost seems to suggest that people consider the statues to be no different than human bodies. Which, of course, begs the question: why do we continue to differentiate between artistic representations of the human body and the body itself?

Laura Nathan-Garner

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When I was perusing the Internet yesterday, something caught my eye. I don’t recall the exact phrase used on the BUST magazine homepage, but the terms “Lynne Cheney,” “erotic,” and “bisexual” were definitely in the mix. Both intrigued and skeptical, I clicked on the link, which took me to the following story:

Marcia Ellen Beevre
is BellaOnline’s Gay Lesbian Host

Sisters — A Book By Lynne Cheney

If you look around hard enough on the Web you find some humorous stuff. Everyone knows that our Vice President, Dick Cheney, has a lesbian daughter, Mary, about whom he rarely speaks openly even though the poor girl has to work for his re-election committee. But did you know that Dick’s wife Lynne, wrote a sizzling western novel called “Sisters” which is filled with hot, steamy stuff like lesbian love, prostitution and rape, and supports a sweeping pro-feminist agenda?

The protagonist, Sophie Dymond, is obviously bisexual as she makes love to her deceased sister’s former boyfriend (outside of marriage I might add), and doesn’t shy away from sex with women either.

Some excerpts:

The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

The young woman was heavily powdered, but quite attractive, a curvesome creature, rounded at bosom and cheek. When she smiled, even her teeth seemed puffed and rounded, like tiny ivory pillows.

Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

“Sisters” was penned in 1981. It’s hard to find a copy today, but Amazon says they will give it a shot for you if you want a copy. It’s been said the Repubos are buying them up to keep the 2nd lady from having to admit to this embarrassment. The Canadian publisher was going to issue a second printing this year, but when the Mrs. got wind of it she called it to a screeching halt.

Like most of the indiscretions of the Bush administration that they don’t want you to know about, “Sisters” will be kept from public scrutiny wherever possible. Odd. Don’t they think we know that Repubos enjoy sex too? Even lesbian sex? Like most women, thoughts about gay sex have obviously crossed this author’s mind.

So apparently, Lynne Cheney can write, and apparently, over 20 years ago, she published an erotic book. And we’re supposed to care … Not that I can deny my own intrigue. After all, I did click on the link, though the link title was not nearly descriptive enough for me to know that the article would merely offer a look at Cheney’s past.

Sure, I suppose that the fact that Cheney penned this book draws into question the Bush administration’s sexual agenda. It does demonstrate that, yes, people from all walks of life think about sex — and all varieties of sex, at that. But does it prove that she supports same-sex marriages or actually engaging in some seemingly taboo practices? Not necessarily. Is one’s fictional writing always equivalent to the writer’s version of reality?

Whatever the case is, I find both this story about Cheney’s book and the attempts by Cheney and Republicans to hide her authorship of Sisters from the public’s knowledge to be symptomatic of “politics as usual.” Of course, Cheney has a past. Strom Thurmond had a child with a black woman. Bill Clinton smoked pot. President Bush was a wildchild and an alcoholic until he “saw the light” on his 40th birthday. He may have even gone AWOL during his time in the service. Newt Gingrich had an affair. Hillary Rodham Clinton used to be a Republican during the 1960s, and many a politician has reversed his or her stance on certain policies. Guess what? Each and every one of us has a few skeletons I’m sure we’d prefer that the entire world not find out about.

Is this productive politically? I think not. Instead of unearthing tales about each other’s distant pasts, perhaps it’s more fruitful for the media, politicians, and people like us to acknowledge that people do change. None of us are born into the person we’ll be at the age of 60. Rather, the experiences that we have throughout our lives allow us to accumulate knowledge, form opinions, learn new things, have new experiences, and alter those opinions and perspectives.

So perhaps instead of simply noting that certain political figures have pasts that contradict what they preach, we should ask why they changed. What experiences did people like Lynne Cheney have that caused them to alter their beliefs? How is Bush able to justify sending thousands of young men and women to Iraq when he went AWOL during his military stint? What was it that caused Bush to “see the light” and find God when he turned 40?

We may not like the answers we learn; we may not agree with what those politicians did in the past or are advocating in the present. But by questioning the causes of these so-called flip-flops, perhaps we can begin to understand the similarities between political leaders and ourselves and make better, more informed policies based on the changes and reversals that enlightenment produces. Maybe then we could finally begin to do politics based on leadership abilities, life experience, and knowledge rather than mudslinging about one’s past, which almost no one in the political spectrum is immune to. At least not if they’re human.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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I’m writing this while listening to Air America Radio’s broadcast of Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission. I write and erase multiple attempts to confront this spectacle.  I feel a dis-ease deep down inside of me, yet I am unable to give voice to this nausea.  In despair, I wonder what I, as a concerned citizen, can say when Rice’s defense has already been over-covered and spun well before she spoke a word in defense of the Bush administration’s actions prior to 9/11.  The one bit of knowledge that I am confident about is that each side is already lining up, eager to gain capital from this media event. Frustrated at the attempt to pierce the veil of secrecy or misdirection or noise, I try to think about whether it is possible in an age of cynicism to retain trust in our public servants.

This is doubly distressing for me because, at the same time, I am developing a writing course designed to facilitate student engagement with the upcoming presidential elections.  How can I expect my students to make meaning out of the swirl of data when I am devoting large parts of my life to informing myself about current events without clear results? I lack certainty! I am often confused! I know my reflective doubt is supposed to be a good sign in that I am avoiding the dogmatic certainty that often leads to abuses, but can radical doubt be the foundation for critical engagement?  Academia has skillfully prepared me to question all texts and positions. Grasping my hammer tightly, I eagerly assault all sacred idols and social illusions, leaving the mess for others to clean up. Perhaps in this time of secrecy and lies it is time to think about a reconstructive ethics?

Still stumped, I have to return to the basics.  What is it I see as a problem in our society?  What plagues my own thoughts? What would I like my students to learn?  What ideas can frame the beginning questions that might allow the imagining of new possibilities?  This nausea that pervades my being initiates a radical need to return to the etymological roots (rad-) of the words that might jumpstart my stalled intellect.

A framing concern for me — personally and professionally — is ecology as the study of the interconnectedness of beings in environmental systems of all types.  The root “eco-” originates from the Greek word oikos, which referred to an understanding of home, household, or more fully, our habitus.  Ecology, then, is the study or understanding (take that apart — the foundations of the ground below us that support our current position) of the world which we inhabit and the attempt to derive new meanings from the interconnectedness and interrelationships of life. The need for ecological awareness seem obvious to me, but the word has unfortunately been paired in an oppositional relationship to another dominating term — “economics.” While ecology derives its conjunctive meaning from logos (knowledge), economics draws its conjunctive power from nomos (law).  We have then in contemporary society a dualistic division of the concerns of these two important and powerful words. The study, knowledge, and understanding of our environments vs. the control, regulation, and management of those environments.  

Might a reconstructive ethics start here in a rapprochement of these two essential concepts for understanding the increasingly interrelated and interconnected global system?  Would the breaking down of these artificial barriers between these two major concerns of life allow for a fuller understanding of how we might restore a sense of justice, rights, and responsibilites? No longer would it simply be an issue of ecology against economics, or the market before our environment, or a separation of the human from nature.  

Still, Rice drones on in the background as our public servants take turns grilling her. Glaringly absent from our current politics is any concern about rebuilding or restructuring our world.  Instead, it is always a matter of attacking, retributio,n or punishment. We must isolate, preempt, and sterilize. We must be on guard, vigilant, and controlling. When will we begin to think about the foundations of our thought and ask if, in our origins, there may be flaws that infect our questions and proposals, stalling our efforts before they start and distorting the results beforehand?

thivai

William Hung is hoping to bang his way up the charts with his debut album, which was released yesterday.

The castoff from American Idol has been transformed into a pop icon despite a lack of singing talent.

Is it just his boyish charm and innocence that have captivated America? SFGate.com columnist Emil Guillermo says it’s the perpetuation of racial stereotypes that has catapulted Hung to the tune of more than 120,000 hits on a Google search.

Most anyone who watched Hung on Idol or downloaded the performance of “She Bangs” on the Internet knows he can’t sing or dance. Guillermo offers a plausible explanation for the William Hung phenomenon: Mainstream America likes to make people of color the butt of its jokes, and Hung fits the classic stereotype of the ineffectual Asian American male.

Hung has guts that go against the image he evokes in some people, and from all accounts, he’s a bright guy.

It’s just absurd to think that if Hung actually did have talent, he probably wouldn’t have a record deal, given the aversion of music labels and Hollywood to Asian Americans, particularly males.

chinoloco

Last week, I went to the New York premiere of an independent documentary that had taken three years of effort by three pro-Palestinian activists. Putting aside my admiration for the dedication of the filmmakers, I left the event with a feeling I sometimes have when in the presence of politicians. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and feel the need to get out of there.

The film, titled “Until when …,” drew dozens of supporters, many of whom had to stand in the back of the room to watch the 76-minute documentary. The film featured interviews with the various members of four Palestinian families living in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The filmmakers, director Dahna Abourahme and producers Annemarie Jacir and Suzy Salamy, originally conceived the film to examine the “right to return” concept. But the film also spent much time exploring the everyday lives of the families through interviews about their daily struggles. At times, the film was touching, at other times predictable.

Now I’ll get to what induced the eye rolling. During the discussion after the showing, a man asked why the film’s English subtitles said “Israeli” instead of “Jew” when the film’s subjects said, “Yahoud” (In Arabic, Yahoud means Jew. But the decision to use Israeli seemed to come from catering to an American audience, who might see the usage of the term Jew as anti-Semitic).

The man who asked the question said that “we” aren’t the ones who should be defensive. Presumably, “they” — as in the Israelis — should be forced to defend themselves. It seemed to me what this man really wanted to know was this: Just how activist are these filmmakers? Just how truly Palestinian are they? He wanted to question their political credibility. He seemed to want to know: Are these filmmakers radical enough to have membership in the Palestinian cause?

The three filmmakers had, presumably, not adhered to the rules of activism. The rules, of course, state that all forces should be marshaled for the purpose of defeating the opponent. Show no weakness; leave no gaps. His type of thinking, like that of propagandists, is a plague on diplomacy. But it raises an interesting question: Should a film like this have as its priority being political or just being art?

Vinnee Tong

Reportage is a function of market and readership, and while this is a natural development, there is certainly something unnerving about opening CNN.com and finding that the front page headline is not about the disastrous developments in Iraq, a reminder that we are living through the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, an update on Haiti or any other consequential piece of news, but rather, “UConn beats Georgia Tech for NCAA hoops crown.”

We are often separated from a variety of ideas, news, facts and opinions by the simple fact of the chasm of language. As a vehicle to help readers distance themselves from their solipsistic worldview that is circumscribed by language, The BBC Monitoring’s site culls reportage from various news media and translates the information from up to 100 languages into English. Today, one portion of the site conveniently gathers snippets and headlines from Arabic language newspapers pertaining to the confrontation in Iraq between the supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia cleric, and coalition forces.    

If this great ether of the Internet can provide more than easy pornography and free music, let it be the opportunity to see the world through a different cultural, religious, intellectual and emotional lens.    

Mimi Hanaoka

When the Coalition Provisional Authority last week temporarily shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, I wondered if Paul Bremer was effectively driving those hungry for political dialogue increasingly towards religious centers.  Apparently he was.

Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr today clashed with coalition forces in Najaf and Sadr City, a Shia enclave on the outskirts of Baghdad. It is possible and probably true that Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers would have engaged in violent conflicts with coalition forces regardless of whether Bremer had shut down al-Hawzah. However, it is certainly worth recognizing that it was only last week that al-Sadr’s newspaper was closed by Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and that the CPA’s rationale for closing the weekly newspaper was that it contained articles designed to provoke instability and incite violence against the coalition forces.

In silencing a potential forum for political discourse, Bremer has certainly failed to stem violence against coalition forces, and he has arguably driven those who desire a political voice even further toward religious centers and violence.  My aim is not to question the importance or impact of these religious centers, nor I am equating violence with religious centers.  Rather, I want to underscore the idea that by silencing a newspaper — a medium that America ostensibly values as crucial to political discourse and the dissemination of ideas — the coalition provisional authority is chocking off an avenue for democratically acceptable political involvement.  

Mimi Hanaoka

While I was at a coffee shop last week, I overheard the guy at the next table say, “I would vote for a potted ficus before I’d vote for Bush.” I couldn’t help but laugh. The idea of a plant running the country humored me, but my laugh was also a bit nervous. Is this what we’ve been reduced to?

The number of times I’ve heard the phrase “anybody but Bush” is peculiarly telling — not just about the concerns of people about the Bush administration but also about democracy more generally. We’re no longer concerned with voting for the candidate who we think can best lead the country, best represent our individual (and collective) interests, and best help sustain democracy. These are desperate times, and they call for desperate measures.

But in the midst of this despair, however, we seem to be missing a prime opportunity to reconsider what democracy is supposed to mean, how it is supposed to be structured, the best ways to make it more representative, whether direct democracy might be better than indirect democracy. No one ever said democracy was supposed to be perfect, but it is supposed to represent the interest of the people and protect the interests of the minority from harm by the majority (though FoxNews might beg to differ). But is that happening as we speak?

A few weeks ago, I attended the premiere of the film, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove made George Bush presidential, and it frightened me — beyond belief. I learned things that perhaps I would prefer not to know about the workings of Karl Rove’s mind and his pseudo-fascist tendencies, but what frightened me more was that there are lots of people who don’t know and don’t care about the ways that Rove has ruined countless people’s careers, started insidious rumors that caught on because no one bothered to question his sources. A few days later, I saw Chisolm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, a documentary about Shirley Chisolm’s run for the White House. I want to say that the inspiring story director Shola Lynch told about Chisolm made me walk out of the theater feeling hopeful, but I wouldn’t want to lie. Instead, it unsettled me. The first black woman to run for president, Chisolm ran on a platform that was for equality — in the most genuine sense of the word — and refused to engage in partisan politics. She spoke her mind and stood by it. But she received little to no respect from her running mates and fellow Congresspeople during her tenure as Brooklyn’s representative in the House. Granted, that was the 1970s and early 1980s. I’d like to think we’d come a long way since then, that democracy had become more representative, that it was the norm — rather than the exception — that politicans sincerely cared about the interests of their constituents more than their own political careers. But despite the increasing number of minorities in the U.S. government today, I’m not sure that the system itself is more representative or more democratic.  

And I’m undecided as to whether it has the potential to be more democratic or less so in this upcoming election. I’ve been told by a friend who works at a democratic polling firm in Washington, D.C., and read in other places that there is a high likelihood that there will be a tie in the electoral college this year, leaving the Republican House of Representatives to decide the election. Given the intense partisanship that seems to have taken hold of the government — and even the electorate, I would put money on it that Bush would be re-elected in this situation. In that world, is it the will of the people who elected those representatives or the will of the representatives deciding the election? Maybe a little of both? Whatever it is, the prospect of this has put me in a quandry about whether I think the structure of the U.S. government is democratic and representative and that democracy will thus prevail even if the election is ultimately decided by the House of Representatives or whether the electoral college — originally intended to guarantee equal representation to individual states based on the number of constituents they hold and thus equalize the playing field — should be done away with in the name of direct democracy.

In one of his essays in his book, Step Across This Line (which I highly recommend), Salman Rushdie talks about how the most democratic thing to have done to resolve the 2000 election would to have been to have Bush and Gore split the four-year term between them or have Bush and Gore essentially have a co-presidency where one was the president and the other was the vice-president since, after all, the electorate was so evenly divided about who should lead the country. It might sound ridiculous — even unfathomable — to us. But might that be the case simply because we have locked into our minds what constitutes democracy — i.e., the structure of the system itself — without considering the people who are part of that system as citizens and representatives? Is it unwise to center this election around Bush and Kerry? Whatever happened to we the people? Ralph Ellison wrote numerous essays in which he theorized about the limits of democracy and the ways in which people could hold democracy more accountable to the people. And every time, he suggested that change could only come from testing the limits of democracy. When we’re talking about “anybody but Bush” and potted ficuses sufficing as the next president, are we in fact testing democracy, or are we simply settling for something less becaues it seems more feasible? Maybe this is a good time to begin reopening the democracy debate — and maybe through that process, we’ll even find something resembling democracy …

Laura Nathan-Garner

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Earlier this week while getting an Aveda prescription hair treatment, adhering to the newly established tenets of metrosexualism — yes, I made that an active verb — I searched for a suitable male magazine.  

Unable to locate Maxim, Playboy or anything otherwise distinguishable as “male,” I settled upon Details, a thirty-something brother magazine to GQ, complete with articles about fashion, etiquette and non-gossipy social observances. It was Details or stare at the wall, pretending to be invisible while waiting for my hair to dry. Needless to say I settled on the magazine.  

While flipping through Details, I came across a standing column called “Gay or …”; the column takes a person and picks apart their look, asking whether each part of their outfit is gay or whatever the case may be. This month’s column, “Gay or Asian,” written by Whitney McNally, featured such observations as “Dolce & Gabanna Suede Jacket: Keeps the last samurai warm and buttoned tight on the battle field” and “White T-Shirt: V-neck nicely showcases sashimi-smooth chest. What other men visit-salons to get, the Asian gene pool provides for free.”  While the tendency is to laugh awkwardly or dismiss such “jokes” as ineffective, I couldn’t help but think about a recent cartoon reducing the history of black people to having been invented in the 1700s as a cheap form of labor. While one could find a way to read this column as a tongue-in-cheek play on contemporary interpretations of the commingling of fashion and culture, lines such as “Louis Vuitton Bag: Don’t be duped by ghetto knockoffs. Every queen deserves the real deal,” make it difficult to look past the racist, classist and homophobic nature of the “humor” employed in this article.  

In an era of championed liberties — the right for heterosexuals to revel in the privilege to marry, the right of conservatives to target minority populations vis-à-vis attacks upon social politics designed to correct social injustices which continue to prevent day, the freedom to speak, or in the case of media, to print that which we feel without consequences for that which we say — how are we to effectively combat the ways that mainstream media uses crude reductionism, crass classism and, in this case, racist/orientalist tropes (read: stereotypes) to pass as inoffensive “humor?” Perhaps, equally pressing is how do we communally access humor without having to offend or make fun of socially preserved and perpetuated stereotypes?

What will you do?

DJ

After September 11, the CIA and the State Department were eager to hire Arabic-speaking people. It seemed as if suddenly, the U.S. had discovered there were people in the world who didn’t speak English and that the only way to figure out what they were up to was to speak their language. The government’s intentions certainly weren’t benign, given that Arabs were being profiled around the world, even at home in the U.S. But at least they encouraged Americans to learn to speak other languages, even learn about other people (though what they learned wasn’t necessarily unbiased or entirely accurate).

Since then, some U.S. leaders have retreated: Don’t learn Arabic. Don’t study the Middle East. Heaven forbid, you learn about an area of the world that has produced numerous religions and cultures — and where the U.S. has played a significant role (for better or worse)  in the politics and daily lives of the people in this region. As Joel Benin writes,

A band of neoconservative pundits with close ties to Israel have mounted a campaign against American scholars who study the Middle East. Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American and former director of the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel-Aviv University, has led the way in blaming these scholars for failing to warn the American public about the dangers of radical Islam, claiming they bear some of the responsibility for what befell us on September 11.

From what we’ve been told since immediately after 9/11, the events of that day weren’t prevented thanks to intelligence shortcomings — or at least the failure of the Bush administration to heed the warnings of intelligence officials, as Richard Clarke suggests. There apparently weren’t enough Arabic-speaking people working for the CIA, or at least the hate and passion with which the CIA began recruiting people based on their abilities to speak Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages indicates that this was the case (trust me, I had more than one Arabic-speaking friend get recruited by the CIA during the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2002).

Playing this blame game has reached a magnitude of unspeakable naivete and self-righteousness. Did the U.S. government and its intelligence operatives seriously think they could avoid speaking a language that was spoken by so many people throughout the world?

As much as I hate to say it, I suppose so. Apparently, some U.S. leaders have decided that the answer to the problem of the failure of Middle East scholars to warn the government that there were some crazy men who happened to be Muslim and who also wanted to harm the U.S. is to closely monitor the activities of university programs studying the Middle East and Middle Eastern languages.

Last year, Congress refused to give in to the demands of a group of politicians and lobbyists who sought to reduce the appropriation for Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which provides federal funding to universities to support study of less commonly taught languages, such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. But, as Benin indicates, proponents of the previously rejected legislation aren’t giving up — and this time, Congress is taking them more seriously. The House has already approved legislation to establish a political review board “to discourage universities and scholars from tolerating bad thoughts,” and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is now taking up the issue.

What exactly does this legislation do? Says Benin,

H.R. 3077 calls for establishing an International Higher Education Advisory Board with broad investigative powers ‘to study, monitor, apprise, and evaluate’ activities of area studies centers supported by Title VI. The board is charged with ensuring that government-funded academic programs ‘reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views’ on international affairs. ‘Diverse perspectives,’ in this context, is code for limiting criticism of U.S. Middle East policy and of Israel.

Under the proposed legislation, three advisory board members would be appointed by the Secretary of Education; two of them from government agencies with national security responsibilities. The leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate each would appoint two more … The advisory board could investigate scholars and area studies centers, applying whatever criteria it pleases. The criteria almost certainly would be political. The whole point of the legislation is to impose political restraints on activities of Middle East centers.

But if failure to understand our differences and refusal to acknowledge the existence, cultures, histories and harm done to others contributes to so many conflicts — both big and small, local and global — is ignoring them altogether really the solution to the world’s problems? Or is it merely a quick-fix solution to the problems of a select few egos who are most concerned with their own credibility and authority?

Laura Nathan-Garner

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:

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